Is Nicholas Stoller now the middlebrow answer to our cinematic sexual concerns? The relatively restrained sexuality of modern American film has led to the marginalization of our voices of indie sexuality, and so the hangover from the early aughts’ gross-out fascination has pushed sex back into the “icky” realm for mainstream cinemagoers. Which is why it was a surprise to see Stoller’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” end with one of the most awkward, ugly sexual encounters in recent memory, a moment that felt honest and hurtful that stood out amongst the film’s mostly untethered sitcom-character observations.
Stoller’s follow-up, “Get Him To The Greek,” features an even more uncomfortable third act sexual encounter, geared towards exposing the honesty in male-female relations. However, it’s a wild miscalculation, a scene spilling over into near-parody and back into sincerity like a rubbernecking highway car. Moreover, like the rest of the film, it seems, in the end, concerned with the morals of embracing a more conventional lifestyle. Little surprise that this is again under the producer of Judd Apatow, the most sexually conservative director currently making movies for adults. Or twentysomethings, maybe. No one really makes movies for adults anymore.
Up until that point, “Greek” is actually rather funny. The story follows record company underling Aaron Green (Jonah Hill), who, when pressured by his demanding boss, comes up with the idea for a concert to celebrate the anniversary of a hugely popular live album from rock band Infant Sorrow. The only hitch is that the timid, somewhat pathetic Green has to personally escort lead singer Aldous Snow to the states during a three day period before the big show. Unlucky for him, Snow is an unstable train wreck of a superstar, geared towards excising his considerable demons rather that acquiescing to the requests of the star-struck studio minion.
What follows is a road movie without an actual road, as these characters seem to teleport from place to place, plane departures nearly as inconsequential as bar stops. Lest you question the chronology, there is an on-screen ticker seen in order to convey just how close they are to stage time, but the film is mostly geared towards plotless diversions in the second act that allow the actors to bounce against each other. The quiet and draggy opening only establishes the standard-issue romantic life Green contends with, which of course becomes a tiresome genre-staple third act issue.
While the Apatow movies have showcased characters dabbling in substance abuse (and make no mistake, this is of that genre), “Greek” is the first to dive headfirst into the world of wild narcotic abuse. At its best, Snow’s persuasiveness easily seduces the gullible Green in a series of vignettes that, at their most immoral, recall the boozy freedom of “Withnail And I” and other consumption classics. Snow, played by sinister comedian and former drug addict Russell Brand, has a Satanic sneer and a jackal’s grin that serves him well, playing someone who’s nearly permanently off the wagon and eager to pull anyone off with him.
Hill doesn’t register nearly as effectively. You can say this for Jonah Hill: if not talented, he’s certainly a performer without fear. During the course of the narrative, his character visibly pukes on himself three times, is anally penetrated twice, and is, ah, photographed in a somewhat unflattering light. We never feel the juxtaposition between straight-laced Green and intoxicated Green because Jonah Hill’s default appearance has always been corpulent and blotto, sometimes Ewok-like. Moreover, perhaps Hill, a career side player, doesn’t have the juice for a lead role. In an early scene where he squabbles with his girlfriend, he doesn’t have the humanity we’d require out of a leading man, and as such appears unnecessarily ornery and petty to the point it’s hard to root for him when he tries to patch things up with her.
The film’s approach towards the record industry, through Green’s hero worship, also seems more than a little schizophrenic. The music, penned by a phalanx of names including Jarvis Cocker and Jason Segel (writer and star of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which receives only a clunky call-back as the origins for Brand’s Aldous Snow), is Brit-arena rock stuck between gimmick music and sweeping big band epics. It’s odd to juxtapose Green’s admiration with Snow’s craft when he sings about the joys of having “The Clap,” especially when much of the music is spotlighted by over-the-top music videos — the third-world-tragedy clip for Infant Sorrow’s “African Child” seems like a joke in search of a punchline.
And what to make of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs’ maniacal record exec Sergio? He gets the lions’ share of great lines as a power-mad lunatic, but Combs, a busy actor, just doesn’t have the natural skill for performing. His slack jaw and dead eyes kill many potentially worthy gags in a role that, with an actual actor, would have lost something without the meta casting, but gained in hilarity. Give this to Mr. Combs and he’s about the eighth or ninth best thing in it. Better than tenth.
“Get Him To The Greek” gets by on its chaotic approach to humor, culminating in a drug-addled free-for-all that features the very first and last time we’ll see a food fight between Diddy and Colm Meaney. Unfortunately, that third act sexual miscalculation (pity poor Elizabeth Moss, sandwiched in the middle of it all) is part of what feels like a half hour discussion of each characters’ personal hangups and biological clocks, as Stoller can’t help but condemn the lifestyles each character leads for superficially puritanical reasons. Green’s last-reel decision especially feels like a last minute reshoot, a narrative dead end that reveals nothing about the character’s feelings about the last few days in his life. At this juncture, it’s pointless to complain about this, because we all know the DVD will have twelveteen different endings and scenes to wrap up, or postpone, the pointless denouement of a series of sketches that need no proper ending. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to ask for more than three quarters of a movie and an extended therapy session. [C+]